Tales of Suspense #47 – Iron Man Battles the Melter!

For the detailed synopsis to this issue http://en.marveldatabase.com/Tales_of_Suspense_47

I recommend a read over of the plot in the link here as I don’t have much to add except to cite this as another issue of constructing the world of Tony Stark. It adds a new villain or rather villains to a growing gallery, one Bruno Horgan, a military contract competitor who’s ruined by Stark’s notifying to the Pentagon of the substandard work being produced. As a matter of revenge the Melter is created out of a serendipitous discovery over a suspect bit of business ethics and what is fair play. The Defense Appropriation committee, with the already introduced Senator Harrington Byrd, gets in on the question of contracts and eyes Stark with rigging his own failings by blaming the Melter.

I haven’t said much about the covers but this one leaps out to a current reader of comics in this age of star creators for blurbing that this 18-page epic is a “super special issue! Lee, Ditko + Heck team up to bring you…Iron Man! Greater more true to-life than ever. ” It almost brings a smile to one’s face to see such a the level of shameless self-promotion that Marvel would later be famous for as one wonders if anyone even know who these guys were at the time. At this point in the title’s history Steve Ditko would seem to have been an odd choice for a book hewing to realism much less exclaiming it on the cover but his art does work well in presenting the Melter. Arguably his style as tempered by Heck’s inking, and like Kirby before, points out the tension between abstraction and detailing that we construe as realistic. In Superhero comics this never-ending battle as to what works best to tell stories in the genre rages on as to what a type of rendering says about reader’s expectation of the kind of story they want to read. How abstract is too abstract if say you want to tell stories about politicians out to frame you as a traitor or for that matter if you want to show two costumed rivals pounding the crap out of each other? At this point in the publishing company’s history, I am not sure that Marvel knew how to answer such a question but it seems clear that they were thinking about what had caused their initial success in bringing back superheroes. Marvel had a stable of artists that they would and could turn to that they called their Bullpen.  While people like Ditko and Kirby had done all kinds of genre at Marvel the two new big hits with Spider-man and The Fantastic Four were done by them and seemed to have hit on something in this genre.  If one could really call it a genre at all rather than a fusion of genres is something I hope to get to at a later date.  I’ll revisit if they were simply expanding a genre with elements of others or is it just a sub-genre of science fiction.